‘Welcome To Chippendales’ Is About Much More Than Just Male Stripping

When Robert Siegel exclaimed, “Murder and the discovery of break-away pants,” Kumail Nanjiani shouted out, “That should have been the title!”

The two men are actually talking about the new show Welcome to Chippendales.

Siegal is the creator, executive producer and co-showrunner of the series, with Nanjiani starring in the drama and serving as an executive producer as well.

The eight-episode limited series, based on the book “Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders,” is a true-crime saga that tells the outrageous story of Somen ‘Steve’ Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who became the unlikely founder of the world’s greatest male stripping empire.

Also starring in the series are Murray Bartlett, Juliette Lewis, Annaleigh Ashford, and Quentin Plair.

Siegel says that Banerjee’s role in creating a male strip club surprised him. “I didn’t know any of this happened when I first came across this story. Just the fact that the guy behind Chippendales was an Indian immigrant is fascinating.”

Ashford jumps in to add, “This was a murder case that spanned over years, which is [also] surprising.”

Another interesting fact, as pointed out by Nanjiani, is that, “two of the main characters in the show [made] a deal, a contract on a napkin at a diner and that napkin held up in court — it was just scribbling — and that was a binding contract. That’s a big part of the story, but I couldn’t believe that.”

There’s also a completely implausible mishap that Siegel says is a big part of the narrative. “[It’s] kind of an infamous thing. There’s a printing error that the whole show kind of hinges on, which is an unbelievable thing that I wish I had made up, but it’s true.”

Bartlett, who plays choreographer Nick De Noia, feels, that along with these seemingly insane details, it’s the entirety of the story that will dawn viewers in. “I feel like I’m like a lot of people who never saw a Chippendale’s show [and] I saw it as this campy, fun, strip-show thing, but I didn’t have any idea that there was this complex, interesting story behind it.”

Nanjiani believes that the story isn’t distinctive just because it’s about men dancing for women but because, “It’s really about what it means to be successful in America and the kind of things that you have to do to be successful in America, particularly as someone who’s not American. So, it’s a show that really explores all that stuff. The men dancing for women is a bonus.”

Giving his thoughts about his character, Nanjiani says, “One of the things that’s interesting about Steve is [that] he did create the space where women could express their sexuality. A lot of times women’s sexuality, still, seems like it’s owned by men, and so he did create this space where women could really express themselves in a way that they had not been able to in a big group like that.”

However, Nanjiani points out, “That was not why he created that space. He was trying to just make money. That was his main thing, and this just happened to be [his] great idea at just the right time.”

But, there were aspects of the business that were very specifically about the women, says Ashford, who plays Banerjee’s co-worker, lover, and confidante. She explains that underneath the ‘campy overlay,’ there was, ‘a belly of everything that was happening socially.’

“The Chippendales story was tethered to the movement of women in this country and them gaining rights and finding their voices,” she says, adding, “The club challenged our hetero-normative views of how women are supposed to behave in a sexual way.”

She adds, that yes, “it was a club and a world dominated by men, created by men, but really the people who made it happen were women because they showed up every day and they were provided with the space to be unabashedly themselves.”

Because of this, she says that she finds, “the glamour and the magic of the show is fabulous, but underneath it’s tethered to some really incredible themes that are still palpable today.”

Along with these themes, there’s still some serious dancing in the series, with Plair revealing, “For me, I was extremely nervous to do it because it was something I wasn’t used to. But, when I actually did dance the first time and I heard the crowd and I really got into it, I realized it was oddly empowering for me, which I would have never thought stripping was my thing.”

Nanjiani laughs a little as he says, “Yeah, you take your pants off, people get excited, that’s a pretty good feeling.”

Siegel says that while sexuality is definitely a big part of the show, it’s really only one part. “It also really goes pretty deep into the nature of the American dream, capitalism, assimilation, second-wave feminism, and racism — what it means to be a non-White person in America. It goes really pretty deep into that.”

Lewis, who admits that she’s been to a Chippendale’s show in the past, says that her character was a bit like a ‘den mother’ for the dancers, and that, “she thinks she’s creating art, which, who’s to say it’s not?”

She adds that if people think the male libido is scary, “wait ’til you excite women.”

While Welcome to Chippendales is quite a dark saga, Lewis believes, “The story is not what I would call cute, but there are elements that are quite comical and riotously so that people are going to really have fun watching.”

‘Welcome to Chippendales’ premieres Tuesday, November 22^nd on Hulu. Watch the trailer here.